The Kepler project wishes to inform the community that it is moving the next data release date (originally planned for June 2011) forward to 1 February 2011. This data set (Quarter 2) is the first consisting of a complete 3 months of observations. It will contain light curves for approximately 165,000 stars (most of which are late-type Main Sequence stars) brighter than 16th magnitude in the Cygnus & Lyra constellations sampled at a 30-minute cadence. Three subsets of one-month each of [up to 512] stars were sampled at 1 min cadence. The shorter cadence data will be released on the same schedule.

The new release will augment the Quarter 0 & Quarter 1 data that were released mid-2010. Q0 data is a unique set of ~10 days of data taken during commissioning of ~53,000 stars of all spectral types with kepmag<13.9. Q1 data consisted of 33 days of data of ~150,000 stars taken between the end of commissioning and the first quarterly roll. The motivation for the early data release is to better support the 2011 NASA Astrophysics Data Analysis Program (ADAP), a funding opportunity which supports the analysis and interpretation of data in the public archives. By tripling the volume of Kepler data in the public archive, we hope to open the floodgates to research opportunities that might be captured under the ADAP umbrella.

The project will hold a splinter session at the AAS meeting in Seattle to inform potential users of how to make use of the archive.